


The Disappearance of Kim Hongjoong

by SleepyFairy



Category: ATEEZ (Band)
Genre: ATEEZ Storyline Challenge, Alternate Reality, Ateez Global Storyline Event, Contest Entry, Dreams vs. Reality, Dreamscapes, Escapism, Storyline Event, Vague
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:27:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25154701
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SleepyFairy/pseuds/SleepyFairy
Summary: In their dreams they could do anything, but was it okay to continue dreaming forever? What would happen to the one that made their dreams if they stopped?My entry for the storyline event based on all member's prompts.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	The Disappearance of Kim Hongjoong

**Author's Note:**

> My entry to the contest! It's very vague and open to interpretation, but I had fun thinking over the concept. It was also the first time I wrote something in one sitting!! Deadlines really make me motivated I guess.

_ A woman stood perched above in the misty void, her skin of black ink and sparkling stars, hair flowing with its own wind and dress of crashing waves. Her arms reached for Seonghwa, calling him forward, but her next words contradicted the motion. _

_ “Open your eyes.” _

_ When he came to Seonghwa was the last one of the bunch, seven of his friends already in the distance with their backs turned. One of them turned back, blue hair rustling at the sudden move.  _

_ “Back to earth yet? Hurry or we’ll leave you behind.” He spoke jokingly, but the despair Seonghwa felt was very much real, as if the world had no meaning if he was to be left alone. _

_ And then suddenly he was alone. Everyone left but only her scent remained. No name or address to be known. As if he was dreaming within his own dream, it all faded away. _

The alarm clock at his nightstand beeped incessantly as Seonghwa fought his way back into reality. Besides it sat a lonesome bracelet, a memoir from a friend.

Seonghwa couldn’t quite remember the face or name of it’s former owner.

✴

_ At the start Yunho felt lost. It wasn’t that he couldn’t do anything, Yunho was actually good at almost everything he tried, and it wasn’t that there weren’t options, there were plenty. But somehow nothing particularly interested him. It all felt meaningless. _

_ But then he wasn’t lost anymore. Yunho was doing something, he was working towards a goal and he was doing it with joy. He was pulled into it, nagged and tricked into paying attention and putting in the effort, but now there was nothing more he cared for than that. _

_ His dreams had scattered friends, all doing their own thing, supporting him from the sidelines, but one was different. The blue haired boy did it with him, they failed and succeed together. _

_ He had a dream and he was gonna achieve it with his best friend, the one that showed him his potential. _

It started with that boy, but it’s also his dream now. But without his friend there’s no meaning to this dream. What was Yunho supposed to do if he disappear? Yunho rushed along the streets, going from his friend’s workplace to his school and then his old house. A new family already lived there, all his colleagues somehow didn’t even remember his name and… 

Yunho found himself unable to remember it either, neither a name nor a face.

✴

_ Yeosang’s dreams were filled with dazzling lights of an aurora and the gleaming stars in the sky above. He sat the crow’s nest of a ship, lunette in hand as the blue haired boy besides him pointed each and everyone of them out, teaching Yeosang their names, rambling on about the images they formed and how they could show him the direction to go in. _

_ “As long as you have the stars above, you can always find the right path.” The boy told him. _

_ Under them in the deck below, their friends roamed around, the driving force that moved the ship, kept it stable. That fateful night they were yelling, rushing their steps. Yeosang was alone, no one was by his side. He looked up, but there were only meaningless cloud. A storm was coming.  _

Adults said  _ ‘Look up at the stars in the night sky.’ _ as if they knew what they meant, as if it was so simple. But, the stars did not shine in that night sky that Yeosang looked at and so he continued to walk looking down on the ground. 

The stars a nameless friend once told him about were no longer in the sky.

✴

_ Most nights many people appeared in San’s dreams, in a field of flowers where the fresh air filled him up and the sunlight prickled his skin. Seven of them were always there even when the horizon beyond seemed impossibly empty. Some were easy to talk to, comforting and uplifting to be around, others were sharp tongued and full of banter that made him feel the slightest bit shy and inadequate, but still filled him with unlimited joy. _

_ That was how most of his nights went by for so long. It was only recently that the dream changed, turned into something darker. _

_ The pristine grass under his feet became a dull grey, the small bushes of flowers mocking him in its meaningless reds and oranges that strained his vision with its vividity, no longer the eye candy they once were. The sky was dark, the few rays that came through were cold and lifeless as San tried to search for his friends. They were moving away, walking somewhere he couldn’t reach, his own body moving slowly as if trying to swim through jelly. _

_ Only one of them stayed, a faceless boy he couldn’t place a name to. _

His dreams were no puzzle or mystery. San didn’t need a professional to tell him what i meant. He was lonely, nothing more nothing less. Moving around often, the erratic and unstable schedule his family put him through dragging him across the country with no regards for how it affected him didn’t allow for him to have friends, to build himself a routine.

His inability to let it go, to be independent, to make something of himself, made him disgusted. Like a bird trapped for so long that it could no longer live outside its cage. San is sick of this life.

_ “You need to move.” The blue haired boy had said that night. He wasn’t there anymore. No one was there anymore. There wouldn’t be a second warning. _

When the moving truck stopped at a red light he made a decision, he jumped out of the car. He was completely alone now.

✴

_ A pile of gold stood in front of Mingi, his friends throwing the coins up and at each other excitedly. Mingi couldn’t quite believe it’s real, hands reaching for the tokens with hesitance, flinching at the touch of cold metal against skin. _

_ Getting to it was not easy, he felt it had been an eternity that they spent searching for that together, inaccurate maps and confusing clues leading the way to a treasure Mingi never considered actually existed. _

_ “See? I told you we could it.” The blue haired boy called to him as he joined them in playing around. _

_ So many times Mingi asked himself if it was worth all the trouble, all the struggles they went through to get there when he couldn’t even believe in the reward behind all of it. He had asked the others before too, if they thought finding a treasure was something they could actually do. ‘We can do anything together.’ was their answer, the cliché not passing any sort of credibility to the skeptical boy. _

_ But they did it, they found their treasure. Their hard work paid off, their faith paid off. _

_ “You can do anything you put your put mind to.” The boy told him from atop the gold pile, looking down at him smuggly, almost if daring Mingi to tell him otherwise. _

When Mingi woke up, he almost believed it. Mingi almost believed he could do anything. But the words of a nameless boy in his dream held no meaning to the sober Mingi that had to live through reality all by himself.

If only he could dream forever. Living without dreaming was a normal thing for a guy like him. Dreams are too lavish to the poor, and so he forced himself to never dream again.

✴

Wooyoung daydreamed frequently, almost constantly. He was awake during his dreams and asleep in reality, flickering through the blending dimensions with ease. The friends he met in those dreams, his precious friends, seemed to only do it at night, unaware of what they were actually doing. But Wooyoung was different, he _knew_ and so he came and went freely.

The blue haired boy also knew, but, unlike Wooyoung, he was always there and always here. He was different in a different way the younger couldn’t describe, could barely understand. The boy was also always worried, getting angry when Wooyoung appeared at the wrong times and hiding the uneasiness when the others were there, when it was the right time.

Sometimes Wooyoung thought that the boy was the one creating the dream, bringing everyone there, but if Wooyoung could come and go by himself that couldn’t be it, right? He started noticing the pattern, how the dreams went through the same themes depending on who the blue haired boy approached. It was  _ their _ dreams. Whenever Wooyoung spoke to the nameless boy it became  _ his own _ dream. A dream of adventure, of friendship, of anything that didn’t bore him to death like his daily mundane life did.

And it frightened him. It frightened him because he didn’t want to ever stop dreaming. He’d lose track of time, only notice that the sky was dark and class was over hours later, only notice he didn’t eat when suddenly he was faint and couldn’t stay up anymore, only notice he wasn’t living his reality when he completely exhausted himself in dreams.

So Wooyoung stopped dreaming. He had to stop, they all had to. Wooyoung gave up on the easy way out, he gave up on dreams and friends, thinking that escaping the crude lonesome reality was something he could not do any longer. All of them thought the same, thought that having dreams was a escape, a coward’s path that they should forget. But they were wrong. 

They shouldn’t have forgotten their dreams. They needed to make them into reality. That was what the boy wanted them to understand. Instead they destroyed their dreams, and with that destroyed the blue haired boy inside them.

  
  


✴

_ With Jongho it wasn’t the same as with everyone else. He didn’t stop dreaming, he never actually started. He followed along in the limbo of others’ dreams as if that’d help him find his own, clinging to his friends’ concepts and ideas, experiencing their happiness and sadness alike as if it was his own. _

_ “Is there nowhere you wish to be?” The blue haired boy asked. _

_ Jongho wondered the same about him, he never saw the boy’s own dream, but instead of being nosy he just answered no. The single word felt wrong on his lips, heavy with the lack of meaning behind it, perhaps there was somewhere. But Jongho didn’t know where it was yet. _

_ Before he could find an answer the dreams stopped. He could tell something was wrong when the nameless boy wasn’t there, once, twice, by the third time there was nothing. Nowhere for him to be or for him to wish for. _

He was too young to know how to reach out to his lost friend then, still is. Where is he now, where should he go? Maybe it was time for him to decide for himself, yet all Jongho wanted was to meet them again.

✴

_ It’s not the reality that makes you lose your dream; it is your decision. _

Hongjoong thought that what they were doing was good, that he was helping them, that maybe if they could achieve his dream in a world where there were no rules, then maybe they’d find the courage to do it in this reality. Or at least comfort them, give them the reprieve to heal from their harsh lives. But he was wrong, he mislead them, made them lose their dreams in the process.

They came to his world by themselves one by one, each more lost than the last. Some of them Hongjoong met in real life, others only in dreams, but he knew they were real, knew what they were going through, their struggles and joys, were real. That’s why he needed to do this. Hongjoong needed to save them. Even if it meant losing himself along the way.

_ “There are countless dimensions in the world.” The man with the black fedora said as the world crashed and burned around him.  _

When he opened his eyes, an hourglass Hongjoong had never seen before waited by his side, at his touch the sand began to flow back back from top to bottom.

That was the start of his journey.

**Author's Note:**

> If you're reading this before the 10th of July, please consider going on the website and checking the entries out to support all the talented writers in there!! I'm on tumblr and twitter @ youseissi if anyone wants to interact I dont bite I promise


End file.
